Due to the overwhelming requests, here is what I look like.  White trash?  Eh, more or less.  Nevermind the stoned kid next to me. 

So, if you’ve ever wanted to HEAR the entire bible, now you can. It’s onsale as a 79-CD box set. Less than $100, too!!! Jim Caviezel is Jesus, Richard Dreyfuss is Moses, Luke Perry is Judas, to name a few…… Who’s the voice of God??? THIS guy, apparently:

For Friday Theme Day we did a song (sometimes 2) in honor of each Sesame Street or Muppets Heavyweight…. Your suggestions were PHENOMENAL…. Here’s what we wound up with:

Animal Nirvana – “Stay Away”	Beaker Devo – “Girl You Want”
Big Bird Pearl Jam – “Yellow Ledbetter” Jack Johnson – “Flake”	Cookie Monster System of a Down – “Sugar”
Fozzie (he annoys me) No One – “Nothing”	Grover Foo Fighters – “My Hero”
Kermit Me First & the Gimme Gimmes – “The Rainbow Connection” They Might Be Giants – “Birdhouse in Your Soul”	Miss Piggy Hole – “Doll Parts”
Oscar the Grouch Garbage – “Only Happy When it Rains”	Ralph Ben Folds 5 – “One Angry Dwarf…”
Scooter Weezer – “Keep Fishin”	Snuffy Crash Test Dummies - “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”

….worried about your brainpower?? Did you take one of those awful online IQ tests?? Not to worry. Read this story…. And ask yourself…… If the bird was sent back to alter the past and succeeded, why would there still be a need to do anything about the past in the safe and comfy future?

If your brain is already sore and tired and needs some comfort food, then click here… Just do a crossword puzzle afterwards…

November 5th 2009

#10 JACK’S MANNEQUIN – HOLIDAY FROM REAL

#9 RISE AGAINST – SWING LIFE AWAY

#8 PINBACK – FORTRESS

#7 JIMMY EAT WORLD – KILL

#6 OASIS – I’M OUTTA TIME

#5 COLDPLAY – SPARKS

#4 INCUBUS – OIL AND WATER

#3 BRAND NEW – OK I BELIEVE YOU BUT MY TOMMY GUN DON’T

#2 THE SHINS – NEW SLANG

#1 WEEZER – ONLY IN DREAMS

The promo for this week’s Trippin Thursday (30 seconds to mars in West Palm Beach) contains a little clip of an old commercial… “Come to FLO-ri-DAAA!!!”

Click on the pic of the Sunshine State to see the full commercial, circa 1979 or so, from Florida’s Tourism Dept… Sure, it’s goofy, but that’s only with 30 years added…. Remember, this wasn’t far removed from the days when the lines between rock, showtunes, and jingles were still being drawn…

……I’m struck by the COMPLETE lack of irony… I cannot imagine ANY piece of advertising for something this pleasureable coming without irony today… There is nothing tongue in cheek about this… And they really go out of their way to make those images of sloppy, sloshy urban winters seem especially miserable…

The movie is The Ninth Gate. Came out in 2000. Johnny Depp was in it. Roman Polanski directed it. Almost everyone I know of dismissed it….. When the credits rolled at the end my friends just groaned and got up to leave…. I sat still…. Felt like I’d just seen a part of the back of my mind projected onto the big screen…. I don’t have time to write more at the moment…… But more is coming………….

***days go by***

…..aaaaaaaaaaaand we’re back…..

….like I wrote in one of the comments below, it doesn’t surprise me that many people have such a low opinion of this movie… But it also doesn’t surprise me that I’m not the only who’s a fan… In lieu of an actual blog about it, I’ll just give you some bullet points…

1. What I thought this film did SO well was depict the experience of contact with something not human… So often, gods and demons and other supernatural forces are presented distinctly like us… In this film, the being in question is presented, subtly, as distinctly NOT like us…

2….and even when it IS kind of heavy-handed (morphing effect), there’s still a real kind of quiet about it… The eyes, for instance… It wasn’t obvious right away… And the floating was done so quietly, no big Matrix moment of heroic athleticism… Just matter-of-fact, as if this was simply what this being did… Finally, the posture and gait of this being… It was obvious that the body was being used as a vessel…. To me, anyway…. I thought it was a great touch…

3.  What makes The Ninth Gate so different than most other “supernatural thrillers” is that there really isn’t much effort made one way or another to characterize Satan, or Evil… No howling, fiery monsters… No brooding fallen angels… No vengeful rebellious figures… No debonair, darkly seductive men… No lusty sirens, either… In fact there’s almost nothing in the way of sadism present…

4… and I think that’s really the point… You can see it in Johnny Depp’s face towards the end… He truly has no idea what he’s gotten himself into, and he has no frame of reference whatsoever for what is sitting on top of him… Same goes for what he’s walking into in the last shot before the credits… That’s what I love about this movie… Its illustration of the moments leading up to contact with the unknown, and then when that contact is made… While Depp’s character’s motives are all too human, the motives and concerns he is unwittingly expediting are quite inhuman, and, inherently, therefore unknowable to us…

5…. so the only thing that IS knowable is the dread, the sensation that something is not quite right…. Though, for whosoever actually inhabits this pre-human (or is it post-human) realm, it is COMPLETELY sensible… There’s a big part of the musical score, one recurring theme, and it really reflects that “business as usual”, unassuming sense of evil… A lot of movie music gets in the way of the important themes, I think… This refrain makes sure you keep going in the same direction as the theme…

Our Lady Peace have been at it for 15 years, and while some say they kinda lost the plot somewhere early this decade, I give them tons of credit for sticking with it and surviving one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen of record label clumsiness  (no pun intended)…

…I’ve interviewed them twice… Once back in 1998 when Superman’s Dead was hitting, and then a few years later when Somewhere Out There came out… Both times, they were simply some of  the most down-to-earth rock stars I’d ever met… No different this time… Click below to hear my conversation with OLP’s bassist Duncan, and if you’re over 21 you better be down there this Saturday night at Power and Light for their free show…

SEGMENT 1: Duncan gives a few specific examples from every major label band’s nightmare….

olp1

SEGMENT 2: …how a major band keeps perspective…

OLP2

He kinda already looks like he has an especially nasty case of swine flu, at least in this pic…

….while it’d have been oh-so-easy to zero in on the more outlandish claims he makes in this blog, I’m more interested in seeing the total picture… Enough sensationalism…

….with someone like Billy Corgan, someone who thinks a lot, feels a lot, processes a lot and then gives output, there are gonna be hits and misses… He is neither a “madman”, a “genius”, or really anything else… When Thomas Edison, after hundreds and hundreds of failures FINALLY got the light bulb to work, was he THEN, at THAT moment, a genius??… Do you assign those kinds of terms  based solely on achievement, or does it have more to do with potential and the inherent traits of a person??

Reading this blog of Billy’s (click on the pic to link), the question occurred to me… Because he says some very worthwhile and valuable things… He says other things that aren’t as well-thought-out… Other things aren’t very lucid at all…. But at least he tries………. And he IS unafraid…. Whether that stems from overconfidence or a sense of balance is another question entirely….